Often Irreverent, Mostly Rational Blog for Fans of the Toronto Blue Jays. One Day, We'll Be Perfect.

Monday, September 8, 2008

Have you noticed that the Jays are unbeatable?

We're still trying to wrap our heads around it. After yesterday's 1-0 win over the Tampa Rays (all hail the mighty Purcey!), the Toronto Blue Jays have won eight straight against teams ahead of them in the standings, and look like world beaters.

If only there were another month to the season.

Unfortunately, the majority of the intellectually slovenly Toronto media has already written this hot streak off as a team winning "when the pressure's off" (fuck you Dave Feschuk), and the Jays will slip into obscurity this month as the sports pages/screens are taken over by discussions of the Leafs' seventh defenseman, the NFL season, the Leafs' fourth line centre, CFL playoffs, the Leafs' pre-season power play performance, jai-alai updates, the Leafs' farm team's assistant deputy to the associate head scout's liaison, poker, and of course, updates on the never-boring story of the Leafs.

It's too bad that no one is going to pay attention to these final weeks of the baseball season. As Whitey Herzog once told an umpire: Yer missin' a great game!

The point is not that the Jays have an outside shot at a playoff (which they really don't, even if we refuse to stop believing.) The point is that much of this roster which is pulling off this streak of wins against legitimate contenders will be back next season. And while the bankrupt cynicism of the Toronto sports media (fuck you Dave Feschuk) will shrug next March and write off whatever chances the Jays have to seriously contend since they will not have blown up the franchise field and front office personnel, the 2009 Jays are proving their mettle now.

Baseball is an ongoing narrative. If you don't recognize that the final pages of this volume lead into the first pages of the next, then your understanding of the progression and the movement of the franchise's fortunes is likely to be incomplete.

Are we a little thin-skinned this Monday morning? Why should we care about what mediocre basketball writers (fuck you Dave Feschuk) snort mindlessly about the Jays on Sunday morning gasbag programs? We really shouldn't care...Maybe we just need more NyQuil.

Do you remember the time?Speaking of the media, does anyone remember the times from 1986 through 1991 - now regarded as the franchise's salad days - when the Jays were regarded by some writers and pundits as "chokers". That they could never "seal the deal" and "get over the hump"...it's instructive to remember this now, because it is easy to see how the writers were missing the point in retrospect, just as they are now.

14 comments:

No team of chokers can ever get over the hump, it's just not possible...until they do, of course. Nice post, although I personally downplay the effect of a late-season push on the following season.(how about those Rockies!). I worry about the team resting on its laurels(holy shit, so many puns, so little time) because of it. If they look at this streak and say "we were close, but it shouldn't have gotten to a point where we had to win 1000 games in a row to be close" and make some good improvements in the offseason, Ill be happy. If they sit back and say, "hey, we won 8 in a row against contenders, let's sit back, count our money, and everything will be fine next season...right?" I'll become a Royals fan.

I'm not going to mention any names specifically, but it really Bugs me when Cranky bloggers discount a winning stretch of baseball as meaningless and run with the whole "big fucking deal, you're out of it, nobody cares, nothing matters" angle.

Does Dave Feschuk ever have anything positive to say? He consistently dumped all over the Raptors last year and I don't think I ever heard him say anything good about the team. He seems like the kind of writer who never learned to be anything but a critic....

They contribute nothing to this world...rather, they merely smear their smug superior opinions across anything and everything that anyone might value.

"Raptors? They suck because they miss shots. The Jays? They suck because they make more outs than they get hits."

This is one of those things that pisses us off about some in the sports media: they hold up for analysis the failures of others, without recognizing that losing and failure is an essential part of sport. (That's especially the case with baseball.)